Community of inquiry framework (COI)

The Community of Inquiry (COI) framework is a theory to explain how, why, and with what effects people approach learning experiences, particularly within online learning contexts.

Definition

The Community of Inquiry (COI) framework is a model for understanding how and why people learn within an educational setting. The COI framework suggests that three main elements are most important for designers to consider when thinking about how people learn:

1. Cognitive presence, which is the individual's participation within the learning experience
2. Teaching presence, which is the teacher's involvement within the learning experience, how they interact with students, and their planning and classroom orchestration activities
3. Social presence, which is the engagement and promotion of participation of all learners within the experience

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000)

Additional Information

Note: The COI framework is far more complex and has a rich history of research using it than this article can summarize. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain all of the aspects of COI. If you are interested in this theory and think it applies to your educational designs, you are encouraged to do further reading on this topic and the three types of presence that it suggests should be present in educational design for social learning.

The Community of Inquiry (COI) framework is used to think about the primary activities that need to be present in a learning experience that uses social learning concepts to inform how and why people learn. Primarily, social learning suggests that people learn abstract ideas and complex concepts better if they have the opportunity to share their understandings with a group and the group can simultaneously share their alternate perspectives as well.

Through social interaction (called collaborative meaning making in the COI framework), groups can come to a shared understanding of what things actually mean from multiple perspectives, and not just be able to recite definitions that they don't understand. As a result, it is argued that students who learn how to think about and apply complex ideas from multiple perspectives can use them in real-world settings later on far more efficiently than if they just memorized a definition.

Within a community of inquiry, an individual learner always participates in a learning experience (through their cognitive presence). However, the theory suggests that they need additional activities and structures to learn about complex ideas and the various perspectives that these ideas are made up from. Within this highly social framework, an individual learner basically interacts with other people in the experience (through social presence) and the teacher (through teaching presence). It is through the mixing of these three types of "being present" in the learning experience that learners are more holistically able to learn about concepts and ideas.

From the perspective of an instructional designer, it is important to know that COI suggests that participants can have rich learning experiences about complex ideas and abstract, hard-to-define concepts if they collaboratively share information and work with each other to develop shared definitions of ideas and concepts. This is achieved through the three-part framework of providing social presence, teaching presence, and empowering people to focus on their cognitive presence in the activity.

Tips and Tricks

• If your learning product involves learning complex topics and abstract ideas to which there are many ways to define or understand them, it may be useful to use a framework like COI to promote deeper learning and social shared understanding of knowledge
• The COI framework is all about thinking whether people are "present" in the activity and how you can support each of these important types of presence. Consider the three main COI areas of "being present" in a learning activity if you choose to use social interactions: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. Each of these types of presence are different in their scope and what technologies and activities enable people to "be present" in the educational activity.
• Think about how an individual learner is themselves present in an activity - especially if online. Does just sitting there and clicking through links or videos count as being present, or is there more to it? Cognitive presence considers how an individual learner is dedicating effort and attention to the activity, which is an essential part of being present in a learning activity.

Related Concepts

• Learning theory
• Participation
• Social learning
• Cognitive presence
• Social presence
• Teaching presence

Examples

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External Resources

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